Olympia Business Watch

Boeing's Glover helps AWB honor 12 companies for Environmental Excellence

Green business is good business.

That was the message carried forward today by AWB's Environmental Excellence Awards, presented at Spokane's Davenport Hotel in conjunction with the association's Spring Meeting.Twelve AWB-member companies were honored for their initiative, innovation and outstanding achievements in environmental compliance, protection and conservation.

Bill Glover, the Boeing Co.'s vice president of environment and aviation policy integration, served as the luncheon's keynote speaker, sharing his company's achievements in improving its environmental performance.

"We believe that being aggressive in reducing our environmental footprint goes along with good performance," said Glover. "An environmental footprint indicates waste, and waste costs money."

Boeing is moving ahead with numerous environmental initiatives, including using energy saving natural lighting in its giant Everett plant, cleaning up old sites that became contaminated due to lower standards of decades past and aggressively pursuing recycling at all levels of the company.

Glover noted that Boeing's commitment to recycling can be seen in the airplane assembly process where the protective coating used during the installation of airplane flooring is now recyclable, reducing waste tremendously.

And these environmental initiatives are no small effort. Fully 70 percent of all Boeing investment includes some environmental improvement.

Perhaps Boeing's most significant green initiative is reducing the carbon footprint of its airplanes. Aviation demand grows by 5 percent per year, Glover said, and the company is working hard to make sure greenhouse gases do not grow with that increase in air travel. Boeing's airline customers have also  pledged their desire and intention to be carbon neutral by 2020.

"We try to use our name and reputation to leverage other people in a positive direction," said Glover.

Brunell: Rising price of gas no mystery

As the price of gas passes $4 on its way to $5 a gallon, the finger-pointing in Washington, D.C., has reached a frenzy, AWB President Don Brunell writes in his weekly column.

As if on cue, the Obama administration has launched another investigation into charges that speculators are manipulating prices.

But the reason for the recent spike in prices is obvious: It's a simple case of supply and demand.

The principle driver of gas prices is the price of crude oil, Brunell writes. "When the price of crude oil jumped from $68 a barrel last year to $115 this year, gasoline prices spiked accordingly."

And why is the price of crude oil rising?

"The unrest in Libya and Egypt, coupled with strikes by oil workers in Yemen, Oman, Gabon and Ivory Coast, has cut production. Less supply means higher prices."

The United States has enough oil reserves to power the nation for 300 years without OPEC, but much of the nation's untapped reserves are located in places hat have been put off limits by the government or are too costly to develop.

"Suffering at the hands of of foreign oil suppliers while we're sitting on 300 years worth of untapped oil reserves is like a family starving with a basement full of food," Brunell writes.

Fixing stormwater runoff problem must be a group effort, panel says

A few decades ago, the biggest contributors to polluted stormwater runoff were so-called "point sources" -- factories, refineries and the like. Things have changed dramatically since then, however, and now the majority of pollution comes from "non-point" sources -- a range of things from lawn fertilizers and pet waste to cars that drip oil in the driveway.

"It's the way we live," Bill Ruckelshaus, the former two-time administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Wednesday during a panel discussion on stormwater runoff.

Ruckelshaus, who was also the founding chairman of the Puget Sound Partnership Leadership Council, was joined in the discussion by Josh Baldi, special assistant to the director at the state Department of Ecology, and Grant Nelson, AWB's government affairs director.

It was organized by the nonprofit journalism website Investigte West, and the think-tanks Washington Policy Center and Sightline Institute.

Panelists agreed that cleaning up Puget Sound and solving the problem of polluted stormwater throughout the state will require effort from everyone.

"We're all a part of the problem. We all need to be part of the solution," Baldi said.

Brunell: It's time to quick kicking the can down the road

Two years ago in a speech to U.S. House Democrats, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted that America was headed toward a fundamental economic reset, AWB President Don Brunell writes in his weekly column.

According to Ballmer, the nation's economy was fueled by unrealistically cheap debt.

Since then, our national debt has continued to grow and now surpasses $14 trillion, Brunell writes. Gov. Chris Gregoire has repeatedly told state lawmakers we must make fundamental changes. We have to quit kicking the can down the road in the hope that our problems will magically disappear.

Doing that means reducing spending, refraining from adding new programs we can't afford, sharing in the sacrifice and using our resources to create jobs, reduce our trade deficit and become less dependent on foreign oil.

For decades, local, state and federal politicians have kicked the can down the road, approving programs with little thought of how to pay for them, Brunell writes.

That must stop. Now.

Lt. Gov. Brad Owen wants more diverse economy - and fewer NIMBYs

Lt. Gov. Brad Owen told AWB that Washington needs to diversify its economy in light of emerging Boeing competitors in places diverse as Brazil and China.

Owen, who spoke shortly before the announcement that Boeing won its bid to build the next generation Air Force tanker, noted the growth of Brazil's Embraer, which just opened a manufacturing facility in Florida, as well as China's development of the C919, a competitor for Boeing's 737.

Boeing realizes who its competitors are, Owen said. "The point is, we have to know this," he said Thursday at AWB's weekly Lobby Lunch meeting. "I don't think we can sit here and rely on The Boeing Company to continue to support the state of Washington for the next 30, 40 years down the road. They will continue to be incredibly important, but we need to find ways to diversify."

Owen, who was actually acting governor at the time of his visit, noted that he's now in his 35th year of public service in Olympia, counting his time in the House and Senate. As lieutenant governor, he has traveled on several trade missions, including eight or nine visits to China.

Remembering Justin Taylor, patriarch of Taylor Shellfish Farms

Justin Taylor digging a channel in Skookum Inlet, August 2009.

The Seattle Times ran a nice news obituary yesterday on Justin Taylor, who died Monday at age 90.

It noted that Taylor still came into the office almost everyday at Taylor Shellfish Farms in Shelton, and that he rarely missed going out on the tide flats during low tide.

"I would look out and see Justin in the bay, and I would feel everything is all right in the world," Taylor's  neighbor Brett Bishop, owner of Little Skookum Shellfish Growers, told reporter Lynda Mapes.

That's where I found Taylor in August 2009, when I interviewed him for an article in Washington Business magazine examining the health of the state's shellfish industry.

Brunell: Facts, not hysteria, needed in coal debate

The debate in Olympia over whether to speed up the closure of TransAlta's coal-fired electricity plant near Centralia reveals an anti-coal hysteria that ignores key facts about our economy, families, factories, hospitals and schools, AWB President Don Brunell writes in his weekly column.

1. Even if we reach our energy conservation and renewable energy goals for 2035, we will still need to generate the same percentage of electricity from coal.
2. Activists ignore the fact that not all coal is the same. The coal that TransAlta uses its Centralia plant is the kind of low-sulfur coal that China covets.
3. President Obama supports investments in clean coal technology.

While America fights over the future of coal-fired plants, China is investing heavily in clean coal technology. It makes sense. Wind and solar are going to be important energy sources, but it will be hard to get them beyond 10 percent of the total power supply.

So until nuclear power is the world's main energy source, the question is not whether to use coal, Brunell says, but how to use it better.

Stormwater tax returns: Deja vu in Olympia

It's back. Only now it's called a fee instead of a tax.

A proposal to levy a 1 percent fee on the wholesale value of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and petroleum products has returned to the Legislature this year following similar failed attempts the last two years.

Backers of the idea want to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue to fund stormwater cleanup projects throughout the state. No one is opposed to cleaning up Washington's water, but the targeted agriculture and petroleum-related businesses that would be hit with a huge new tax -- one that would raise $345 million over the next two years -- are crying foul, telling lawmakers that it's not fair to make them pay for what's really everyone's problem.

"SB 5604 unfairly singles out two industries, namely petroleum and agriculture, and forces them to pay for a societal problem," Grant Nelson, AWB's government affairs director, told lawmakers Thursday during a meeting of the Senate Ways & Means Committee.

Gov. Gregoire's Keynote Remarks at AWB's 2011 Legislative Day

(Recorded: Feb. 03, 2011) Gov. Chris Gregoire’s keynote remarks at AWB's annual Legislative Day luncheon. Topics include unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, state employee pensions and education.

Brunell: We need to rethink our renewable energy policy

In his state of the union address, President Obama said he wants 80 percent of America's electricity to come from "clean sources" by 2035. That's a tall order, and one that will require us to rethink our renewable energy strategy, AWB President Don Brunell writes in his weekly column.

If we have any chance of reaching the president's goal, we must rethink our renewable energy strategy, particularly with respect to sources like hydropower and pulping liquors.

Hydropower accounts for about 80 percent of our states'e electricity, and yet it was excluded from the list of renwables under Initiative 937, the voter-approved measure requiring utilities to buy 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Pulping liquor also was excluded, even though paper mills such as Longview Fibre in Longview have been able to take this byproduct and generate electricity with it, in some cases producing a surplus that is sold back to the grid.

Americans must be realistic about their energy future, Brunell writes. The federal government must rethink regulations that derail renewable energy products. And the Legislature should do its part by changing I-937 to allow pulping liquors to qualify as a renewable.